L-M is one of the major data-aggregators for the government and hearing this about Comey lets me think his position there respects the law and basic rights.

The silence of the WH as of this last few weeks has been something to behold.  Where are they in their framing and mindset?????  This is what I want to know.  Are they spending their holidays ploting again to do something to someone someplace.  Knowing thier ways, I am very supicious of them.

full article linked here The Fundamental John Ashcroft

 Chosen by President Bush to win points with social conservatives, the attorney general seemed disengaged in his first months in office, disappointing his allies on the right. Many liberals were relieved to see him seemingly biding his time, and not acting like the zealot they had depicted during a bitter confirmation battle.

But after Sept. 11, Ashcroft became absorbed, if not obsessed, with his new mandate: Find the terrorists, stop them, and make sure this never happens again. He pushed forward with a series of bold measures that alarmed his critics and even unsettled some fellow conservatives. Within the administration, he emerged as the hardest of the hardliners, serving as the president's spear catcher for controversial initiatives like the military tribunals and the suspension of due process for noncitizens caught in the terrorism investigation. Once a critic of expanding the federal government's police powers, he now argued that the administration could be trusted to wield such powers wisely. A year earlier he had warned that using secret evidence in immigration proceedings violated the rights of the accused; now he ordered that certain immigration hearings be conducted in secret. And when critics, including some Justice Department and FBI officials, challenged his approach, his response echoed the president's post-Sept. 11 declaration to the world: You're either with us in the fight against terrorism, or against us.
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The defiant attorney general who testified before his former colleagues in December was far different from the embattled nominee who had appeared before the same committee for his confirmation hearings 11 months earlier. In the fall of 2000, Ashcroft's bid for reelection to the Senate from Missouri had been defeated under weird, and demeaning, circumstances. His challenger, Mel Carnahan, had died in an airplane crash, and Carnahan's widow had agreed to take the seat if her deceased husband outpolled Ashcroft. The dead man defeated the living incumbent. Six weeks later, President-elect Bush named Ashcroft his choice for attorney general.
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During the hearing, Ashcroft was conciliatory, if unapologetic. He portrayed himself as an inclusive fellow who repudiated "racist ideas." He maintained that despite his fervent opinions on guns and abortion, he would not seek to remake laws that displeased him. It was a Joe Friday performance: He would be A.G. just to enforce the law, ma'am. Ashcroft won confirmation by a vote of 58-42-the narrowest margin of any Bush appointee. Nearly half of his former colleagues had slapped him in the face.
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And there was another similarity: his schedule. He often headed home to Missouri on Thursday afternoons and would not be in the office on Mondays. "Things piled up," says a senior department official. "When you have a job like this, it fucks up your life. Ashcroft was going home on weekends." One Friday early in Ashcroft's tenure, a top department official and an FBI agent flew to Missouri to have their boss sign a top-secret wiretap application connected with a terrorism investigation. Department gossip about the incident reached the Washington Post, which reported that "Ashcroft wasn't pleased to see [the pair] standing in front of his house. And there they stood in the cold while Ashcroft sat in his pickup to read and sign the documents."
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 On the morning of Sept. 11, John Ashcroft and four aides were in the air, flying to Milwaukee in a government jet. A call came in on the attorney general's secure phone. He hung up and said, "Our world has changed forever."

His perhaps more than most. Ashcroft, the less-than-fully engaged attorney general, was now in charge of the largest criminal investigation in the nation's history. His department-which oversees the FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, US Attorneys' offices, the Bureau of Prisons, and the Drug Enforcement Administration-was command central for efforts to detect and disrupt future plots. In the weeks after the attacks, and during the subsequent anthrax crisis, Ashcroft appeared before the TV cameras at all hours, often with the FBI's Mueller at his side, offering updates and reassurance about the administration's initiatives. The fleshy bags beneath his eyes became more pronounced. There would be no more four-day workweeks.

"It seems harsh to say, but prior to Sept. 11, I wouldn't have expected such a powerful reaction from Ashcroft," remarks one department official. "It quickly was evident that he took his new responsibilities very seriously."

If Ashcroft had entered the Justice Department without an agenda, he possessed one now. "We got speeches from him about not missing anything," recalls another Justice attorney. "He was a man with a cause. You could feel it in the building. To him, the job became terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. He was devastated by the attacks. It happened on his watch."

....More

Bush Grabs New Power for FBI
While the nation was distracted last month by images of Saddam Hussein's spider hole and dental exam, President George W. Bush quietly signed into law a new bill that gives the FBI increased surveillance powers and dramatically expands the reach of the USA Patriot Act. The Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004 grants the FBI unprecedented power to obtain records from financial institutions without requiring permission from a judge. Under the law, the FBI does not need to seek a court order to access such records, nor does it need to prove just cause. Previously, under the Patriot Act, the FBI had to submit subpoena requests to a federal judge. Wired Tuesday January 06, 2004

There's an old saying that you should never let a fox guard the henhouse. The same could be said of the investigation into the latest White House scandal. Attorney General John Ashcroft is refusing to appoint an independent prosecutor to investigate who in the administration leaked the name of a CIA operative to journalists. This despite the fact that Ashcroft has long-standing ties to one of the main suspects: President Bush's top political advisor Karl Rove.
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 Rove is best known as the driving force behind Bush's taking of the presidency, but he also worked for Ashcroft over the course of two decades.

"It goes all the way back to the mid 1980's when John Ashcroft first ran for governor and then when he ran for the United States Senate against Mel Carnahan," says Moore. "Karl was so intimately involved."

Not only did Rove work for Ashcroft in the 80s, but he was one of the main forces behind Ashcroft's controversial appointment to the job he currently holds, attorney general. Rove lobbied intensely for his former employer's nomination after Ashcroft lost his senate seat to a dead man, the late Mel Carnahan.

While Ashcroft was not Bush's first choice for attorney general, Rove reportedly told Bush that spilling some blood over the nomination of the fiercely right-wing Ashcroft was "a no-lose proposition."

Just as George W. Bush profited handsomely from the building of a stadium for his Texas Rangers baseball team, Karl Rove cashed in from the successful campaign in St. Louis to get a stadium built. The governor who signed the legislation?

John Ashcroft.

Now attorney general, Ashcroft is refusing to hand over the reigns of the criminal investigation of his political ally, former employee and longtime advisor, Karl Rove.
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The Ties That Bind

  Ashcroft was in a position to protect his friends and also others he wasn't as loyal to. When he continually refused to appoint a special counsel, hoping the noise would settle down and be forgotten, the pressure finally forced him to recuse himself. Conyers played a big role in this. The conflicts of interest with career DOJ believing that Ashcroft was actually keeping the WH updated as to what developments were happening. Not just Rove, but Gonzales and Card were in doubt about the way they handled the notice to preserve evidence.